The street is an acutely lively and precarious assemblage that emerges in a structural, material and psychological relation to power. In this paper I reflect on ten years of grounded research on diverse economies that are forged in urban peripheries across the UK, where people and places are subjected to multiple forms of dispossession. By exploring the syntax of street livelihoods, I engage with the street as neither a marginal nor minority condition, but as a space of recalibration and refusal. I think through the differing vocabularies of counting, detailing and activating we deployed in our research collaborations, and our varied approaches to unsettling the established planning grammars of whiteness. In hindsight, some of our strategies appear as brittle, and too close to the professionalised languages of master-planning. Where the syntax comes to life is when it resonates with the everyday improvisations and solidarities of the street.